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Technology
Welcome back to This Week in Apps, the Extra Crunch series that recaps the latest OS news, the applications they support and the money that flows through it all.
The app industryis as hot as ever,with 194 billion downloads last year and more than $100 billion in consumer spending. Peoplespend 90% of their mobile timein apps andmore time using their mobile devicesthan watching TV. Apps aren&t just a way to waste idle hours — they&re big business, and one that often seems to change overnight.
In this Extra Crunch series, we help you to keep up with the latest news from the world of apps.
This week, we&re taking a look at Apple Arcadenew gaming franchise, Fortnite maker Epic Games calling out the Google Play Store for its monopolistic practices, Androidnew AR features, Disney+one-month app footprint, and more.
Headlines
Apple Arcade scores a big sports game franchise, &Ultimate Rivals&
Apple Arcade launched in September offering over 100 games for $4.99 per month. Since launch, the service stays fresh by adding new releases on a regular basis. This week, Apple touted one of Arcadebiggest wins to date — an all-new sports franchise from Bit Fry Game Studios, called &Ultimate Rivals.& The new game brings together athletes from across hockey, basketball, football, baseball, and soccer to play in a licensed video game thata first for the mobile gaming industry. The debut title in the franchise, out now on Apple Arcade, is &Ultimate Rivals: The Rink,& which lets players choose from over 50 athletes to compete in two-on-two hockey matches.
For example, you could pit Alex Ovechkin and Alex Morgan against De&Aaron Fox and Jose Altuve or Skylar Diggins-Smith and Wayne Gretzky, Apple says.
The game was made possible by Bit Frygroundbreaking licensing deals with nine pro sports organizations, the NHL, NHL Players& Association (NHLPA), NBA, National Basketball Players Association (NBPA), MLB, MLB Players Association (MLBPA), NFL Players Association (NFLPA), WomenNational Basketball Players Association (WNBPA), the USWNTPA, as well as Wayne Gretzky.
Next spring, the Bit Fry will launch &Ultimate Rivals: The Court& as the next title in the series.
The franchise is a big win for Apple Arcade, which doesn&t yet have many sports-themed titles. In fact, with the addition of &Ultimate Rivals,& it now has only a half dozen. And because of the numerous pro sports deals, the game has the potential to appeal to a wider audience.
Fornite tries to bypass the Google Play Store30% cut
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Founded in 2012, Nomiku became a plucky Silicon Valley darling by bringing affordable sous vide cooking to home kitchens. A Kickstarter project that same year generated $750,000, several times its $200,000 goal. The company scored a glowing TechCrunch profile the following year, as well, thanks in part to a great backstory.
Today, however, the company noted on its site and various social media channels that it is winding down operations:
Well, I am sorry to say that we have reached the end of the road. It is with a heavy heart (and deep-felt gratitude for your patronage) that we are writing to let you know that we are discontinuing the Nomiku Smart Cooker and Nomiku Meals effective immediately, and suspending operations. While we still believe in the concept, we simply were not able to get to a place of sustainability to keep the business going. Thank you very much for your support, it has meant a lot to myself and everyone here at Nomiku.
&The total climate for food tech is different than it used to be,& Lisa Fetterman said in a call to TechCrunch. &There was a time when food tech and hardware were much more hot and viable. I think a company can survive a few hurdles, and a few challenges [ …] For me, it was the perfect storm of all these things.&
In total, the company raised more than $1.3 million over two Kickstarter campaigns, putting it in the upper echelons of food crowdfunding. In 2015, the startup joined Y Combinator and launched a cooking app called Tender, featuring recipes from prominent chefs.
In some ways, Nomiku appears to be a victim of its own popularity. The company was able to bring a cost-prohibitive cooking technology down to an affordable price point, only to see the market flooded by competitors. Fetterman highlighted some of those issues in a recent Extra Crunch interview.
In 2017, Samsung Ventures invested in the company, with plans to integrate it into its SmartThings connected platform. That same year, Nomiku began to pivot into subscription meal plans, but had difficulty getting the word out. Fetterman says the company was seeking funding toward the end, but ultimately couldn&t make things work.
Even with a buzzy company and a great product, the startup world can still be unforgiving.
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Read more: Consumer sous vide startup Nomiku is winding down operations
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Yesterday, Adobe submitted its quarterly earnings report — and the results were quite good. The company generated a tad under $3 billion for the quarter, at $2.99 billion, and reported that revenue exceeded $11 billion for FY 2019, its highest-ever mark.
&Fiscal 2019 was a phenomenal year for Adobe as we exceeded $11 billion in revenue, a significant milestone for the company. Our record revenue and EPS performance in 2019 makes us one of the largest, most diversified, and profitable software companies in the world. Total Adobe revenue was $11.17 billion in FY 2019, which represents 24% annual growth,& Adobe CEO Shantanu Narayen told analysts and reporters in his companypost-earnings call.
Adobe made a couple of key M-A moves this year that appear to be paying off, including nabbing Magento in May for $1.7 billion and Marketo in September for $4.75 billion. Both companies fit inside its &Digital Experience& revenue bucket. In its most recent quarter, AdobeDigital Experience segment generated $859 million in revenue, compared with $821 million in the sequentially previous quarter.
Obviously buying two significant companies this year helped push those numbers, something CFO John Murphy acknowledged in the call:
Key Q4 highlights include strong year-over-year growth in our Content and Commerce solutions led by Adobe Experience Manager and success with cross-selling and up-selling Magento; Adoption of Adobe Experience Platform, Audience Manager and Real-Time CDP in our Data - Insights solutions; and momentum in our Marketo business, including in the mid-market segment, which helped fuel growth in our Customer Journey Management solutions.
All of that added up to growth across the Digital Experience category.
But Adobe didn&t simply buy its way to new market share. The company also continued to build a suite of products in-house to help grow new revenue from the enterprise side of its business.
&We&re rapidly evolving our CXM product strategy to deliver generational technology platforms, launch innovative new services and introduce enhancements to our market-leading applications. Adobe Experience Platform is the industryfirst purpose-built CXM platform. With real-time customer profiles, continuous intelligence and an open and extensible architecture, Adobe Experience Platform makes delivering personalized customer experiences at scale a reality,& Narayan said.
Of course, the enterprise is just part of it. Adobecreative tools remain its bread and butter, with the creative tools accounting for $1.74 billion in revenue and Document Cloud adding another $339 million this quarter.
The company is talking confidently about 2020, as its recent acquisitions mature and become a bigger part of the companydigital experience offerings. But Narayan feels good about the performance this year in digital experience: &When I take a step back and look at whathappened during the year, I feel really good about the amount of innovation thathappening. And the second thing I feel really good about is the alignment across Magento, Marketo and just call it the core DX business in terms of having a more unified and aligned go-to-market, which has not only helped our results, but italso helped the operating expense associated with that business,& he said.
It is no small feat for any software company to surpass $11 billion in trailing revenue. Consider that Adobe, which was founded in 1982, goes back to the earliest days of desktop PC software in the 1980s. Yet it has managed to transform into a massive cloud services company over the last five years under Narayanleadership.
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Read more: Adobe turns it up to 11, surpassing $11B in revenue
Write comment (90 Comments)With the regular season coming to an end in just two weeks, today’s game is particularly important for the Buffalo Bills as a win against the Pittsburgh Steelers is all the team needs to clinch a spot in the playoffs. The Steelers meanwhile are just one game behind Buffalo for the fifth spot in the AFC as they chase a Super Bowl 2020 berth.
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Software as a Service, also know as SaaS, is a cloud-based service where instead of downloading software your desktop PC or business network to run and update, you instead access an application via an internet browser. The software application could be anything from office software to unified communications among a wide range of other business apps
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Write comment (98 Comments)The race to the playoffs is on and this weekend you’ll get to see the Los Angeles Rams go up against the Dallas Cowboys at AT-T Stadium as Super Bowl 2020 looms. This is a game you won’t want to miss as the Cowboys will surely be looking for revenge against Los Angeles after they lost to the Rams during the divisional round of last season’s pla
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